Refugee crisis in India: A study on socio- political status of Rohingya refugees

Legal and Legislations

The Rohingya crisis, at present, is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and history which has often been ignored or forgotten by the international agencies and other countries. They are politically and socially excluded in their home country-Myanmar and are downgraded to a stateless community by the Myanmar government. The mass migration of Rohingyas into the neighboring states of Myanmar have created problems and posed several challenges to the refugee host countries like India. In this article books of eminent authors, articles in research journals, newspaper reports have been scanned and analyzed while doing the research. Several online databases and internet search engines have also been used to keep the study updated. The study revealed that India not being a signatory to the Refugee Convention of 1951 and its Protocol of 1967 and the absence of its own refugee law creates a huge problem for India towards governing its refugees. With the absence of domestic refugee law, there is no proper domestic law to define who are refugees and illegal immigrants in India and the fact that the Indian government has a power to dictate on these terms which creates an unequal situation for the asylum seekers as the authorities have started to carry out religious discrimination among refugee groups. The growing number of refugees in India without a proper documentation can put the national security at risk and that the Indian authorities need to adopt proper rules for its refugee management and instead of continuously balancing its humanitarian obligations and national security, India needs to frame its own refugee law in order to deal with them in a consistent and uniform. Therefore, we can say that the Rohingya crisis is not only a problem or issue of Myanmar as it has escalated into a larger refugee problem and needs a solution.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.